jon_hendry

The thing is, publishers and distributors can make better deals with Amazon, because Amazon will carry a wider array of stuff including physical books, including books that don't make sense as ebooks such as pop-up books, or the books that come with accessories like tree seedlings to plant or meditation beads or whatnot.

Um, the fine minds of the Fed, Congress, and the Clinton and Bush administrations declared some of the instruments off limits from regulation.

Then they went off to Wall Street and collected their millions of dollars.

No, but it is an indication of the "enforcement" and regulation bodies being cowed and coopted by the bankers, which certainly effects the handling of the recent clusterfuck by the same bodies.

If they aren't going to let an investigator bring John Mack in to talk about a little insider trading case, they certainly aren't going to bring him and his peers in to talk about melting down the financial system, unless their message is "can we throw any more free money at you?"

So if my broker has an app, and I use it to buy a million shares of a company in my account, Apple should get 30% of the transaction?

For what, providing networking functionality?

"But will this be true for long, now that this particular shoe has dropped?"

iBooks is still an also-ran. Publishers pretty much have to work with Amazon. iBooks is easier to ignore, I should think.

I'm waiting for Apple to apply a per-MB charge for all data you access on iOS via WiFi or 3G that doesn't come from Apple.

He gives one example, of an SEC investigator who got fired just for trying to talk to John Mack, now running Morgan Stanley, about a suspected case of insider trading. (An associate of Mack suddenly started buying a company's stock in huge amounts, shortly before the company was acquired, and made $15 million. The acquired company had been a client of Credit Suisse. John Mack interviewed at Credit Suisse just before this, and had been leaning on his associate for a piece of another deal. The implication being that Mack picked up some info at Credit Suisse about the upcoming acquisition, passed it to his buddy, in exchange for a piece of the other deal, which I think made Mack about $10 million.)

Morgan Stanley had a bunch of their lawyers pressuring the SEC above the investigator's head. Most of those Morgan Stanley lawyers were former SEC or DOJ bigwigs themselves. As a result, the investigator was fired, even though he had recently received sterling reviews. The fired guy eventually won a $750k wrongful dismissal suit against the SEC.

"But the people who thought there was going to be some kind of central library of domain-specific classes in your company, that you would reuse in multiple disparate applications, I think that was always fairly naive"

Well, perhaps, but I've seen it done successfully in NeXTSTEP/OpenStep shops back in the day, such as an investment bank. Not one big library, but a few frameworks so there's some separation.

The team I was on had our own frameworks, shared among the apps we developed. We also used/built our frameworks on frameworks from the bank's Architecture group, which were also used by other development groups.

I think a lot of the benefits of OO reuse have been lost due to platform shifts. If you build a system on NeXTSTEP in the early 90s, then throw it out and switch to Java, then throw it out and switch to C#, you're naturally going to lose a lot of the efficiencies you theoretically could have taken advantage of had you somehow managed to stay on NeXTSTEP or OpenStep all along.

And then, of course, you have mergers and acquisitions leading to code being thrown away or warehoused or merged with other systems, or new management deciding to start from scratch.

Basically, the industry doesn't really have a long enough attention span to really make the most of OO code reuse.

To me, popularity implies being seen in a favorable light, whereas "notable" is more like the absolute value of popularity or un-popularity.

I've occasionally bought books via my Kindle device. More often I buy using my computer's web browser and have the book delivered to the kindle.

NSFormatters do a lot of stuff, internationalization, user preferences for number representation, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise if they're a bit heavy. IIRC they're pretty much intended for UI display, not for tight loops.

"it's related to the word "popular.""

Well, no, it isn't. Many things are notable that are not "popular", or even common. Leprosy, flesh-eating bacteria, progeria, Jeffrey Dahmer.

There's also a vicious cycle here: the existence of an article on Wikipedia may lead people to not post related articles elsewhere on the web, instead relying on the WP article. That may lead in turn to the article's subject being considered insufficiently notable.

But it's right in line with the worst petty academic pissing matches.

Like the California math professor who was recently arrested for repeatedly peeing on his colleague's office door.

I always heard it as "a cat will steal the baby's breath", which is a bit more supernatural than mere physical smothering.

That might have originated in seeing a cat sniffing a baby's exhaled breath. Much like a cat will sometimes sniff around your own mouth or nose, if its face is near yours.

It's not clear Google has that kind of control. They don't control the Exchange server. They're just feeding data to it.

"Do you seriously believe the whole "the leak is very serious, but at the same time trivial"-story"

All I know is that nobody looked through the leaked material and found something beyond what we already knew about.

No joke, really. It's a drugstore/pharmacy that also sells greeting cards, house cleaning supplies, candy, snacks, coke and pepsi and milk, and really low-quality hardware like screwdrivers made of weak steel.

The sorts of electronics they sell there are overpriced and low-quality unless they're actual name-brand items. An LED nightlight sold there is likely to be weak, and badly designed, and overpriced even at $5.

If I saw a $99 Android tablet at Walgreens, I would assume that it would be better to simply burn the $99 - at least then I wouldn't have a useless device to store or dispose of.

(I was just at a Walgreens, and they actually had some Wii units for sale. I wouldn't buy one there, but I assume there's nothing wrong with them.)

The main thing about the Iraq War Logs was that there was nothing particularly new or surprising or shocking. Details about incidents, but nothing war critics didn't already assume had happened many times.

When someone says "We've got horrible things to reveal", your imagination fills in the blanks, extrapolating from what we've already found out to even more horrible extremes.

But then what Wikileaks revealed didn't live up to that. It was pretty much more of the same things we already knew.

It's no wonder the reaction was subdued. It doesn't mean people don't care, it just means we're too burnt out to work up a rage about the sorts of things we already knew were happening.

"If you are only willing to put in minimal effort and a drab of creativity, there are many low-paying hourly wage, or other, jobs out there for you. "

Unless they won't hire you because you're "over-qualified" and they assume you'll bolt for the first higher-paying job that comes along.

Hell, I'd be wary of a $5 LED nightlight sold at Walgreens.

"I've seen novices do amazing design work."

Sure. It happens. But that's not the way to bet.

See: Kim Jong-Il

The 1970s high school grad likely had it better, as there were more decent-paying factory jobs then.

Alternately, the solution might be to spend money on education so that the same people have more degrees.

Of course, when they get their second, or third, and still can't find work...

The government, because't the loans are likely underwritten by the government.

It's not clear that a self-trained design novice would have much more luck finding work, unless he turns out to have a natural genius at it.

He'd be competing for work against experienced designers, and against newly-graduated design students.

Sometimes a UI goes wonky, and I find it useful to be able to click on the zoom as a way to 'reset' the display in a somewhat predictable way.

This may be like pressing an elevator call button to make it come faster, but I still like having some graphical evidence of an offered functionality. Without a zoom slider, then it's not clear whether other zoom functionality is enabled at all.

P(cancer) >> P(hit by a bus)

I know a woman under 40 who had cancer, and a woman under 30 who had cancer. And I may know more, for all I know. Plus plenty of over-50s who've had cancer. And my social sphere is not all that large.

I'd have to say cancer is not really a low-probability event.

Also: Toy Story was made at the tail end of his 30s. (It came out the year he turned 40).